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Her back pressed flat to the wall, Isobel inched her way toward the stairwell. The woman pivoted where she stood, and the white gauze swirled tighter around her form, like the garb of a mummy. Through the screen of the veil, the black pools of her eyes followed Isobel’s every movement.
“At first you were just another coal added to the fire. Fuel for his hatred, and I’d have had reason to thank you. Then his dreams changed.” Underneath the gauze, her head tilted to one side and her delicate brow knitted, as though she did not quite understand this observation. “Uninvited, you invaded the corners of his subconscious and intruded on our time. Your mere image became a nuisance, a distraction.” Her open palm snapped shut into a hard fist. “In this room, it was not I who was the ghost, but you. And so I sent them for you while they still could obey. You were, after all, yet an uncertainty in his thoughts. They would have had you that night too, if not for the aid and protection of your masked guardian.”
It took Isobel only a second to realize that she was talking about the night she left the bookstore, the night in the park. She recalled what the blue Noc from the crypt had said. Had he been there that night too? Only then she hadn’t been able to see the Nocs. And the voice that had whispered for her to run? Hadn’t the blue Noc also mentioned her “masked friend”? Of course. It only made sense now that it had been Reynolds trying to warn her.
“In the end, however, you shall have little to thank your secretive friend for,” Lilith said. “In time I shall discover him as well, and he will soon find that I have a special fate for those Lost Souls who betray me.”
“Why are you doing this?” Isobel demanded. “Why Varen?”
“He is not like others, is he?” she asked almost wistfully, and floated to the oval window. Through it, Isobel detected new light, warm and orange, like a streetlamp. “He is special, even in regard to those who have come before him,” Lilith continued. “Like them, he holds the ability to receive and interpret the shades and shadows of the dreamworld, to bring life and body to new ones, such as the Nocs. What is more, though, is that energy within him that drives him to destroy as much as he creates. The only thing he lacks is control. That in itself is what makes him so perfect. Tonight he is to finish my story. Tonight, when you are gone for good, he will set me free.”
Uh-oh, Isobel thought. Say what? Rewind. What was this “gone for good” business? Isobel flashed a forced smile as she fumbled backward, edging farther and farther toward the stairwell. Apparently, despite Isobel wearing his jacket, Lady-Lovely-Locks didn’t quite seem to get that Varen had left the proverbial building. It was about time for Isobel to make her exit too, link between worlds broken or not.
That was when the thought hit her. Instinctively she clung tighter to the sketchbook. The answer came to her in a flash, and suddenly it made all the sense in the world. It was all there.
Varen’s doorway into the dreamworld. Lilith’s story. The Nocs. This was the bridge between realms, his way in, on its way to being her way out. The link Reynolds had told her she would know—she held it in her very arms!
Lilith, too, seemed to see the light of realization in Isobel, because she turned and stared through her with those hole-black eyes. “It’s too late,” she said, “for you to do anything. He cursed you the night he wrote your name within those pages, for now you are part of the story. That is how you are able to see us fully in your world. Or did you not wonder?”
“If I destroy this book,” she said, “this will all go away. You and everything else will go back to where you came from.”
“And where will you go, Isobel? You who now has a foot grounded in both realms? You would rip yourself asunder? You would perish for the sake of one who is doomed already?”
“What—what are you talking about?”
“Did your masked guardian fail to mention your own fate? I am not surprised. I suspect he is selective in what he chooses to share with you. It would be an inconvenience for him, I think, if you were able to make too many decisions of your own. But it doesn’t have to end this way. It appears to me that we have been pitted against each other by men. Why? When we both have something the other wants.”
“I’m not giving you this book,” she said. Her footsteps took her backward until her heels found the edge of the top stair.
Lilith laughed, a soft and almost melodious sound, haunting and even beautiful. “Do you not see that you yourself are now something of far greater value?”
“What?” Isobel blurted, her mind unable to wrap around Lilith’s meaning.
“However unwittingly, you have become a link between realms. Your name in those pages has transformed you, has made you better than a poor lost boy’s sketchbook, for you are not a link to power, but power itself. Together we would have free rein over all, for I know all routes and you, dreamer, hold the ability to traverse them. I would no longer need an ending.
Why, when we would live forever? Bound as one with you, I would no longer have any hold over your Varen. He would be released, free to be with you, with us.”
The woman moved toward her, the veil falling away from her face as she drew closer. She was dark beauty perfected, her cheekbones high and regal. Her skin held the sheen of stardust and her hair, dark, massy waves of silk, seemed to float about her like a black halo. It was her eyes, though, almost alien in essence, that held Isobel so completely transfixed. Fringed with dark lashes, twin wells of bottomless ink, they trapped her, and she found herself no longer able to blink. “Take my hand,” she whispered, and raised her white palm once more. “Come with me.”
Isobel felt her hand lift.
The pull of those eyes was magnetic, a force that couldn’t be fought or resisted. She was so beautiful. Isobel paused, her fingers hovering just over the cold set of white ones.
This was how she must have lured Varen.
The thought came to her suddenly, buoying to the surface through a deep and cloudy sea of confusion, doubt, and longing. How easy it must have been for her, she thought. She’d made promises to him just like this. Only she had promised him more. So much more.
Like a serpent, this demon had coiled and nested into those empty and cavernous spaces of his heart. Like a harpy, she had preyed on his absolute aloneness—on his need for a
“Lenore.”
You could never be Lenore, Varen had once told her.
In her mind, Isobel imagined the future. A future void of herself. But also void of the creature before her. She pictured Varen safe at home. Sitting at his desk, he filled the pages of a new sketchbook by candlelight. His purple-inked poetry packed the crisp white sheaves of paper, her name printed more than once within those lines of elegant handwriting. In the company of soft, feathery drawings, those lines would be his last farewell to her.
Would he write about her? She liked to think that he would. About how, forevermore, the syllables that made up her name would continue to drift to him on the wings of his dreams—dreams now free of the ghouls and demons that had once haunted and stalked his mind. Finally, in this small way, she would be his Lenore.
She blinked at last. Her fingers twitched and retracted.
